Wednesday, April 1, 2015

It was brought to my attention recently by
reputablesources
that the recent announcement of increased usage in recent
years produced an internal firestorm within Mozilla. Key
figures raised alarm that some of the tech press had interpreted the blog post
as a sign that Thunderbird was not, in fact, dead. As a result, they asked
Thunderbird community members to make corrections to emphasize that Mozilla was
trying to kill Thunderbird.

The primary fear, it seems, is that knowledge that the largest open-source email
client was still receiving regular updates would impel its userbase to agitate
for increased funding and maintenance of the client to help forestall
potentialthreats
to the open nature of email as well as to
innovate in the space of providing usable and
private
communication channels. Such funding, however, would
be an unaffordable luxury and would only distract Mozilla from its
central goal of
buildingdeveloperproductivitytooling.
Persistent
rumors that Mozilla would be willing to fund Thunderbird were it renamed
Firefox Email were finally addressed with the comment, "such a renaming would
violate our current policy that allprojects be named Persona."